The Passage of Justin Cronin

Justin Cronin is still a bit sensitive about the word “vampire.” Yes, the supernatural bad guys in his sprawling, 766-page novel, “The Passage” — about death-row inmates infected by the United States military with a rare Bolivian jungle virus, afflicting them with superhuman strength and a lust for human blood — are recognizable as very close cousins of the fanged creatures who’ve torn a bloody swath through American pop culture. Yes, Cronin originally sold that book, along with two sequels — the first of which, “The Twelve,” comes out this month — for close to $3.75 million, and the film rights for a reported $1.75 million. Yes, that cinderblock-size apocalyptic thriller hit the best-seller lists soon after its 2010 release. And yes, he received a very public benediction from no less a pop-literary eminence than Stephen King, who called in during an appearance by Cronin on “Good Morning America” to congratulate him: “You put the scare back in vampires, buddy!”

Yet when Cronin first began discussing “The Passage” with his agent, Ellen Levine, “he liked to call them ‘glowsticks’ or ‘fliers,’ ” she told me. “He didn’t like to call them vampires.” Even now, years later, you can still catch Cronin wincing just a bit when you use the word.

“When I started writing ‘The Passage,’ ” he told me recently, “I said O.K., I’m going to write a story that arguably has something rather like a vampire in it. But I have to do two things. One is I have to wonder why I chose that and what’s interesting about it to me. And two, what do I want to do that’s my own take on it?”

Cronin, by all appearances, is an unlikely heir to America’s genre-fiction throne. He has an M.F.A. from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and a PEN/Hemingway Award for his book “Mary and O’Neil,” a meditative novel about love and loss told in a series of short stories. He has never read any of the “Twilight” books — “I’m kind of not the demographic,” he says. And “The Passage” is not only, or even primarily, about vampires: it spans nearly a hundred years and contains dozens of vividly voiced characters, from gruff, lonely F.B.I. agents and quasi-mystical nuns to chemically neutered pedophile janitors supervising shady government operations hundreds of feet underground. When he started formulating the book, he explains, the “vampire boom had not yet occurred.”

To Cronin’s mind, the center of the book is the mournful tale of an abandoned young girl named Amy, who may or may not hold the key to the salvation of the tiny sliver of mankind that survives. “The Passage” began life as a conversation between Cronin and his daughter Iris, who was 9 at the time. (She’s now 15.) She was the one who suggested that he write a book about a girl who saves the world. She’d been reading a horror novel from the drugstore, she recalled during a recent interview with her father. She gestured toward her dad. “And you were like, ‘What would you like me to write a book about?’ I think I mentioned vampires.”

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“The Passage,” the novel in which vampire-like “virals” are unleashed.Credit
Gabrielle Plucknette/The New York Times

“The very, very original sprout was a question you had asked me when I was folding laundry,” Cronin said. Then he laughed. “I think it came from you saying to me that my books were boring.”

The details of “The Passage,” the book that would change Cronin’s life, were worked out as Iris rode her bicycle around Memorial, their neighborhood in Houston. It was fall, and Iris was getting in shape for soccer season. She would pedal, her father would jog beside her and the two would trade plot points. “It was virtually a word game,” Cronin said. This game went on until Christmas. The two of them would swap ideas back and forth, asking each other over and over: “O.K., what happens next? What happens next?”

This summer, I visited Levine, Cronin’s agent, in her office near Madison Square Park in Manhattan. Levine’s clients tend to be highbrow literary types — Marilynne Robinson, Michael Ondaatje, Russell Banks — and her sunny office is lined with their books, shelves and shelves of elegant titles in elegant script curling down elegant spines. There are not a lot of monsters or mass-market paperbacks in evidence.

Levine showed me the e-mail she drafted to accompany the 397-page unfinished excerpt from “The Passage” that she sent out to publishers. Her note advertised the book as “a thriller with big themes, a sophisticated apocalyptic novel: think ‘The Stand’ meets ‘The Road.’ ” She told prospective buyers that the book had been written by Jordan Ainsley: the pseudonym, she wrote, “of a prizewinning literary novelist.”

Mark Tavani, an executive editor at Ballantine Bantam Dell, was one of the recipients of Levine’s e-mail. He remembers taking the partial manuscript home. The story he read was set in a bleak, near-future America beset by unwelcome developments: Louisiana hosted a chemical slick known as “the Federal Industrial District of New Orleans”; in Texas, Gov. Jenna Bush presided. And then, in a turn not lost on an experienced editor in the age of “Twilight,” the vampires showed up.

Tavani came to work the next day certain that Ballantine needed to purchase “The Passage.” He called Levine. “I told her I thought it was great,” he told me. “But I also said right away I will never make an offer on a book if I don’t know who the author is.” With Tavani’s interest assured, Levine revealed the author’s identity. Jordan Ainsley was Justin Cronin, a 44-year-old English professor at Rice University and the author of two modest but well-received works of fiction, “Mary and O’Neil” (2001) and “The Summer Guest” (2004), a quiet, heartfelt novel about fly-fishing and generational legacies. Those books sold well. But Levine felt that “The Passage” had “real commercial potential” — hence the pseudonym. “I didn’t want any preconceptions about what kind of writer he was and what the sales might be,” she said.

Further complicating the matter was the fact that Cronin already had a deal with Dial Press, a literary imprint that’s part of Random House and that published his two novels — and he owed it a third one, for which he’d been paid an advance. That third book, he told me, “was my wife. And all of a sudden I was in the presence of a mistress I could not resist.” The mistress was “The Passage.”

After consulting with his actual wife, Leslie, Cronin decided to call their accountant. “We weren’t calling to find out if we had enough money — because we didn’t,” Cronin said. “We were calling to find out if I didn’t pay the money back, could they get the house.”

The Texas homestead exemption, Cronin gratefully learned, goes back to the state’s earliest settlers — it’s a law designed to, among other things, keep degenerate husbands from gambling away the family home. (It protects your house from general creditors to which you owe money.) So even if things went horribly wrong, Cronin and his family could at least count on four walls and a roof.

There were other risks, of course. Until this point in his literary career, Cronin followed a pretty straight line. He grew up in Massachusetts and New York. His mother was a homemaker; his father worked at General Foods. “Many of the products that you see on ‘Mad Men,’ my father had something to do with,” he says. He went to boarding school in Andover and college at Harvard. After graduating, he was traveling around, teaching secondary school, when he decided to apply to the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. “I really liked a book called ‘The Best American Short Stories 1985’ that my sister had given me for Christmas. And in all the author bios in the back, like half of them had something do to with Iowa,” Cronin recalled. He arrived during the height of fictional minimalism. “People were all talking about Raymond Carver. I really didn’t know who that was.”

He married Leslie, a poet he met at Iowa, started freelancing, wrote a novella, got a job teaching at La Salle in Philadelphia and then another one at Rice in Texas. He published “Mary and O’Neil” at 39 and won a few awards. “My plan was to go on writing books of the type that I had written and to continue to teach,” he says. He and his family were happy in Texas. They’d take a few weeks of vacation each year. His kids would get a free ride to Rice. “We were in a good public-school district. We’re like, there it is, right?”

The idea of “The Passage,” seductive as it was, threatened the family’s equilibrium. Still, Cronin couldn’t resist. So Levine encouraged him to put aside the novel he owed Dial and continue work on the book he felt compelled to write. Eventually, Cronin told me, he “wrote enough to show around. And you know there’s the legal particulars of getting out of a contract and paying money back and so on, and I was able to do that where everybody was happy. Because it was clearly not a Dial book.” And so Cronin and Dial parted ways amicably.

The night before the partial manuscript went out, Cronin and his wife discussed what would happen if nobody bought the novel. She asked him, “Will you finish it?” By that point, Cronin knew he’d already given himself over. “I said: ‘Yeah. If nobody takes it now, I’ll finish it and see what happens then, but I really like the story. It’s the best thing I’ve got right now, and I’m going to keep working on it.’ ” Still, he fully realized “it was entirely within the realm of possibility that nobody would want it.”

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“The Twelve,” a darker sequel to “The Passage” that introduces a new menace.Credit
Gabrielle Plucknette/The New York Times

Two weeks later, Justin Cronin was a millionaire.

There is a question that tends to come up around Cronin: Did he sell out? Some critics greeted “The Passage” with skepticism. In The New York Times Book Review, Mike Peed, in an otherwise-positive review, wrote: “As Justin Cronin clearly knows, if you’re a writer seeking to slough off highbrow pretensions — to reject your early efforts at ‘quiet’ fiction and write something with commercial appeal, something that will, if not conquer the critics, at least pay for your kid’s college education — you’d be wise to opt for a vampire novel.”

Still, the difference between a literary novel and a genre-oriented one is not usually of much consequence to readers — nor is it particularly apparent to most writers, who tend to see the same blank page no matter what kind of book they sit down to work on. “You write how you write,” Cronin told me. “If I were a calculating careerist, I would not be a novelist.” When I contacted Colson Whitehead, the MacArthur-genius-award-winning author who last year released “Zone One,” a literary novel about a zombie takeover of Manhattan — my message to him included the words “literary” and “genre” — he replied politely that he’d “rather shoot myself in the face” than have another discussion about the difference between one category of literature and another.

Other people’s labels can matter, though, especially when it comes to sales. Cronin did not sell either of his first two novels for anything close to $3.75 million. And at the larger publishing houses, “there’s more of a blockbuster mentality,” Sarah Weinman, a longtime publishing-industry reporter, said. Just as in Hollywood, publishers lust after big-ticket, sequel-friendly series like “The Hunger Games” or “Twilight” because “they run their profit and loss statements and say, what are they going to make money on? And a book they project to sell only 10,000 copies may not be worth their while.”

Has publishing gone in the direction of contemporary Hollywood, where there are $2 million movies, like “Winter’s Bone” (2010), and $220 million movies, like this year’s superhero pageant “The Avengers,” and very little in between? When I put the question to Cronin’s editor, Mark Tavani, he responded by opening up his computer and pointing me to a recent interview with Spike Lee in New York Magazine in which the director was asked if he thought he could get a movie like “Malcolm X” (1992) made in Hollywood today.

“If they can’t make Malcolm X fly, with tights and a cape,” Lee responded, “it’s not happening.”

By adding an element of the supernatural to a plot-heavy story about a young girl in search of her destiny, Cronin had drastically changed the commercial potential of his novel. In publishing, vampires are tights and a cape.

In “The Passage,” mankind is winnowed to a remnant of a remnant, but it’s still in many ways a hopeful book: civilization hangs on, and a hardy few even begin to put the pieces back together. “The Twelve” is darker. The book returns to the beginnings of the vampire outbreak, where we find out more about the origins of some of the characters we’ve come to know. Then the novel moves forward again, into a future where the primary menace has morphed from monster to man: survivors must contend not just with murderous vampires but also with a cultlike society called the Homeland, in which a small, venal ruling class presides over a colony of terrified workers in the vicinity of what used to be Iowa. The twist, Cronin told me, was inspired by George Orwell’s “1984.” Cronin wrote his college thesis on that novel, tracing the origins and development of Orwell’s increasingly gloomy certainty of man’s capacity for evil.

One thrill of writing the first two books of his trilogy, Cronin found, was the chance to delve into another, less palatable side of himself. Even before he began “The Passage,” he told me, he was chafing at his reputation as a guy who writes “these sort of warm, warmhearted domestic novels. And indeed, I am a warmhearted and thoroughly domestic man who gets up and makes pancakes for his children and kisses them on the head when he sends them off to their day.”

But, he continued, “I liked the idea of people saying, ‘How could this person be that person?’ One of the things I constantly think about as a writer is the way in which people are full of contradictions — there’s all this contradictory information inside a human personality.” He laughed. “I didn’t want to become a bad literary character, you know?”

Cronin’s first two novels are lovely, in a muted way. But they are delicate books, written in a tone that can feel no louder than a whisper. “The Passage” and “The Twelve” vibrate with a different kind of energy: louder, wilder, more unkempt. Working on them, Cronin told me, “gave me a great feeling of freedom and license.” He went on: “I have any number of completely dark obsessions and fascinations, and none of this was present in my profile or my growing profile as a writer.” The new material offered him a chance to be “the other Justin.” That guy would be a lot like the writer the literary world already knew — interior, meticulous, family-oriented — but maybe a bit different as well. For instance, a billion civilians might die in his new book.

Cronin stilllives in Houston but spends his summers with his wife, Leslie, and their two children, Iris and Atticus, who is 9, on Cape Cod, where in 2010 he bought a charmingly creaky home. “Total impulse buy” he said when I visited him there one overcast morning in August. On a sun porch, we moved from window to window, battening the house down against an oncoming summer storm. Atticus, who everyone calls Tuck, was spread out on the couch in the next room, drawing a comic book. Iris drifted in and out. The story of how she helped inspire her father to write “The Passage” has, like Stephen King’s nationally televised endorsement, become part of the book’s attendant lore; when Cronin appeared on “Good Morning America,” George Stephanopoulos mentioned that, following the book’s sale, Cronin bought his daughter a pony.

In school now, Iris says, her classmates sometimes ask her if she’s proud of having written a best-selling book. Iris tells them that’s not exactly how it happened. But recently, she’s been trying her hand at fiction as well. This summer, she spent a week at a writing program in Virginia until, in a very Cronin-like twist, a devastating windstorm forced her and her classmates to evacuate. She was still working on the novel she began there, she told me. I asked her if it was literary fiction, like her dad’s two other novels, or more genre-based, like the two installments of his trilogy.

She looked at me patiently, as though the answer was obvious but I hadn’t yet grasped it. “Genre,” she answered, decisively. “I think an imaginative postapocalyptic book is the way to go.”